We've now had the first two incarnations of the Osmocom Berlin User Group Meeting. The start was great, and we had probably something around 10 attendees. Some were the usual suspects like the various Osmocom developers living in Berlin. But we also had a number of new people attending each of both of the meetings, which is good.
To my big surprise people are even flying in from other parts of Europe in order to be able to attend. Last time from Sweden, and for the next meeting some folks from the Netherlands have announced themselves.
To an even bigger surprise, the attendee from Sweden announced that he is working for an Ericsson research lab, and apparently they are using OsmocomBB quite a bit inside that lab. They think it's a great tool, and apparently nothing else with the same flexibility (i.e. full source code) is at their hands that can compete.
On the one hand it is surprising to see such a large traditional Telco supplier to start to use such amateur tools like OsmocomBB, which definitely have not had even a fraction of the testing (particularly with various operators in various countries) like the commercial protocol stacks.
On the other hand, if you think more about it, Ericsson is entirely a network equipment supplier today. They have spun off their baseband processor business to become part of ST-Ericsson, they have pulled out of Sony-Ericsson, sold their TEMS product line to Ascom and other bits and pieces to Tieto. So right now, if they need a MS-side protocol stack or engineering phones, they probably have to obtain what is available on the market. And that's unfortunately not all that great, as the products are either
- Measurement devices aimed at mostly L1 testing / QA (Racal, Agilent, Rohde-Schwarz)
- Trace mobiles primarily aimed at field testing (TEMS, Sagem OT) and while they provide traces they don't permit you to send arbitrary data or behave spec-incompliant
- Mobile Phone development platforms (Qualcomm, MTK, Infinenon, ...) which don't necessarily give you the full source code to the stack, and are only available if you actually intend to build a handset
So all in all, the more I think about it, it is actually not too surprising that they ended up with OsmocomBB. It's free (as in free beer) and they get the full source code with it. You need a lot of skills and time to get it running and find your way around how to use it, but I guess if you're working in cellular protocols and embedded systems, it's not that hard.